people seem to liken puffins to parrots because of their colours but their appearance seems more akin to penguins to me. their habits are quite penguin like as well, if you ask me. technically though, they’re in the auk family. the key divergence from penguins is that they are amazing fliers and can reach speeds of nearly 90 kilometers per hour. 400 flaps per minute. you try that. they’re also amazing swimmers and actually use their wings to power their motion and use their webbed feet as rudders for steering. they can dive down about sixty metres. i really didn’t know that they spend quite a lot of time at sea – usually for an entire winter. like emporor penguins (i believe), atlantic puffins select a mate and return to one another every mating season. both the male and female incubate a single egg, per season…so the women don’t have to lay the egg AND go foraging for food. and seemingly related, yet unrelated, puffin books is an imprint of penguin books. fratercula arctica in moleskine.

a source of guilt: eating delicious tuna sashimi…toro….whatever cut, i love it. nevertheless, i try to eat less of the stuff but i have not been able to completely will it out of the diet. maybe one day. being more conscious of the food i eat and where it comes from is something i’d definitely like to focus on, where i can. respecting the animals i eat is important to me. it’s crazy to me that such large fish are endangered. longer than i am tall, this type of tuna spans over two metres in length and weighs in at about two hundred fifty kilograms, on average. the surprise among my fact-finding is this: they’re warmblooded fish. not earth shattering news but perhaps a good bit of jeopardy trivia. but this allows them to wander into very cold atlantic waters. they eat just about anything. kelp. plankton. crustaceans. squid. eels. etc. they seem like the jocks of the sea. they’re built for endurance and speed sometimes migrating from north america to europe several times a year. they’re also delicious. to the point that they have been heavily overfished. maybe that one day to stop eating this fish will come sooner rather than later. thunnus thynnus in moleskine.

a good friend of mine recently realised that there are no tigers in africa and no lions in asia. turns out, he was partly wrong. a very small, endangered population of lions exist in the gir forest in india. asian or asiatic lions aren’t that different from african lions – they’re just a bit smaller. panthera leo persica in moleskine.

these “little armoured ones” are quite unique among mammals, most obviously because they are the only such mammals to come packaged with armoured shells. i had no idea that there are nine varieties of these animals who can grow up to five feet in length. at that size they’re over hundred pounds! i wonder how much of that is typically due to their shells which, curiously, not all types of armadillos rely on for defense. some have too many plates to be able to roll up and completely encase themselves. only the three banded variety seem to have that option. mostly they run away however some run into patches that are thorny or treacherous enough for their predators (big cats, bears, and even raccoons) but not so treacherous that their own armour cannot protect them. they’re rather poorly equipped from a vision perspective but of course, they can smell quite well. being relatives of sloths, they sleep. a lot. like sixteen hours a day lot. and like ant-eaters, they have long sticky tongues that they use after digging to get their fill of insects though they are omnivores. and the final random fact: those in andean regions used to make musical instruments out of armadillo shells called charangos.

so if you’re ever asked to describe an arctic skua in a word or two (i know i have), you can simply answer with: kleptoparasite; or, parasitic jaeger. jaeger is german for hunter. they do find their own food (eggs, small birds & mammals, fish) but their hunting methods are a bit different, i’d say. they spend a fair amount of time stealing food from others. they are pirates…of the avian variety. let’s be clear though, they don’t just, you know, sneak into the dens of other animals and yoink some food. no no. they team up during flight and body check their victims into dropping the food they caught and reap their rewards. they genuintely rob their victims. i always thought that if it occurs in nature it’s a good model for whatever you’re adapting that principle on…i guess i’ll draw the line here. a bit of etymology: skua means seagull in old norse. stercorarius parasiticus in moleskine.

so finally (at least to me), the difference between hares and rabbits? hares are bigger. longer ears. taller hind legs. i find it interesting that they can be loners but you can also find them in groups of thousands. i’d love to see that. thousands of arctic hares! i’d probably miss them though. it’d probably be winter and i’d probably not seem them camouflaged in the tundra. also, i wouldn’t be out in the dead of winter in a patch tundra. i kind of like that during mating season, they pair off and do their own thing. they establish their own territory away from others. and crazier still, they can run up to sixty kilometres an hour! what?! lepus arcticus in moleskine.

i think we all have a bit of knowledge on ants. they live in really intricate colonies, sometimes underground, sometimes in wood, or sometimes not at all (depending on the species). their strength to weight ratio is incredible. there’s usually one queen in a colony. there are over ten thousand different species. they burn under focused light from a magnifying glass. i didn’t know that worker ants are typically female. and the males, well, they just mate with the queen. they possibly die afterward too. i’ve always found their method of communication fascinating and i didn’t learn this until my final year of university. a colleague’s thesis revolved around basing network routing rules on the chemical / pheromone based communication that ants use. as they travel, specifically in search of food, they leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of their pheromones. ants that successfively follow the trails sense the stronger or more, um, pheromonic trails and reinforce the “scent” as they follow the trail to the food source. the weaker trails tend to vanish. it works in nature, so why not try it elsewhere, right?

national geographic says that these are possibly the ugliest animals on earth. poor guys. they need love too, right? you might remember one such fish from a certain disney movie about a certain clownfish (link to appear when they’re drawn…if i remember). the largest of these fish (of which there are hundreds of different of types apparently) are over three feet long. that’s over a hundred pounds of ugly-fish! not my words, national geographic’s i swear. what’s crazier is that their mouths are flexible enough for them to be able to eat prey that is double their size. so if you are one such fish, don’t call them ugly and don’t look at their fishing rods dorsal protrusions. anglerish in moleskine.